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Osaka city does not wish to be outdone by Kyoto, so I am to lecture to the teachers there, and the city is to provide for us at the hotel, and the mayor to give us a banquet there. Of course, Mamma is the only woman present, as it would not occur to them to invite their own wives. Foreign women are expected, however, to do strange things, and they are very polite to them.
It is recorded that when the famine was at its height, rice could not be obtained in some parts of the country for less than forty ryo a koku. Sanguinary riots took place in Yedo, Kyoto, Osaka, and elsewhere. The stores of rice-merchants and the residences of wealthy folks were plundered and, in many cases, destroyed.
"Around it stretched a triple line of moats, the outermost measuring nine and a half miles in length, the innermost one and a half, their scarps constructed with blocks of granite nearly as colossal as those of the Osaka stronghold, though in the case of the Yedo fortification every stone had to be carried hundreds of miles over the sea.
The fame of this exploit soon became noised about Osaka, so that all men praised Jiuyémon's courage; and shortly after this he was elected chief of the Otokodaté, or friendly society of the wardsmen, and busied himself no longer with his trade, but lived on the contributions of his numerous apprentices.
An American factory owner in Osaka, summing up his Job's trials with raw Japanese labor, used exactly my own phrase in a newspaper article a few days ago, "Cheap labor is never cheap." And all my investigations have convinced me that the remark is as applicable in Japan as it is in America or England. The per capita wages of Japanese laborers here are, of course, amazingly low.
He not only accorded a friendly audience to Father Organtino, as representative of the fathers, but also he went in person to assign to the Company a site for a church and a residence in Osaka. Nor did he confine himself to licensing the missionaries to preach throughout all Japan: he exempted not only churches from the billeting of soldiers but also the priests themselves from local burdens.
The best time to start from San Francisco is early in September, so that Japan is reached about the first of October, which is a delightful month in that pretty toy-land, neither too hot nor too cold. A month will enable the tourist to see all that is specially interesting Yokohama, Yeddo, Kiobe, Kioto, Osaka, Nagasaki, and some of the notable inland sights.
Then, stirred once more by his in-dwelling love of adventure, he took to the sea again with his faithful band and sailed to the eastward. Rough waves and swift currents here disputed his way, and it was with difficulty that he at length landed on Hondo, the main island of Japan, near where the city of Osaka now stands.
At Osaka where in 1532 the priests of the Hongwan-ji temple had built a castle which Nobunaga captured in 1580 only after a long and severe siege, Hideyoshi built what is called The Castle of Osaka. It is a colossal fortress, which is still used as military headquarters for garrison and arsenal, and the dimensions of which are still a wonder, though only a portion of the building survives.
Then they took a polite farewell of each other, and set off for home again, and to the end of their lives they believed that Osaka and Kioto, which are as different to look at as two towns can be, were as like as two peas.
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